Time to retire the ‘China threat’ debate
Time to retire the ‘China threat’
debate
WRITTEN BY MARIANA VIEIRA
4 May 2021
Over the past two decades, Chinese economic development has fuelled heated debates over China’s rise and whether it is primarily a ‘strategic threat’ or a ‘market bonanza’ for the US to contain or engage. Experts have argued back and forth as to the nature of the threat, attempted — and criticised attempts — to guess China’s grand strategic ambitions or defaulted to Cold War analogies.
However, this increasingly myopic ‘China threat’ debate has yet to come to terms with two limitations: its autobiographical nature and ahistorical understandings of China’s role in the global economy. Perceptions of a Chinese threat are not only underpinned by particular notions of American identity but also influenced by prevailing narratives of Western engagement with China in the past. But these securitising analogies and crisis management vocabulary are unhelpful and misguided in prescribing policy recommendations towards China. An alternative discussion is already taking place on the fringes, incorporating a broader historical perspective that moves experts from denial to acceptance of China’s prominence, without insisting on its global dominance.
Limitations and implications of the ‘China threat’
Despite claims about China’s potential ‘strategic misbehaviour’ or the ‘essential peacefulness’ of its culture, it should be obvious that China’s power does not speak for itself. Highlighting the subjectivity of judgements about China, John Fairbank concluded in 1976 that “at any given time the truth about China is in our heads”. Of course, China is real but its existence as an “object of media curiosity or social enquiry owes a lot to the consumers in the marketplace of knowledge, their expectations, presuppositions and established self-imaginations”, Chengxin Pan, author of The 'China Threat' in American Self-Imagination, explains.
Because the ‘China threat’ debate is premised upon the American understanding of 1945 as year-zero of its own global hegemony, proponents struggle to grapple with the potential for different, past and future, conceptions of a global order.
In US discourse, perceptions of China as a threat to others are intrinsically linked to how American policymakers and China specialists see themselves — as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation. As the remaining global superpower, the US demands absolute security and too readily understands the uncertainty of global politics as threats. The process of othering China as a growing threat keeps alive a tradition of bolstering US hegemonic leadership, as old as the American declaration of independence. In the early days of American history, Europe, seen as the Old World, was repeatedly invoked as threatening to corrupt the New World of the Western Hemisphere. While the post-WWII world saw the Soviet Union raised to the ranks of arch-enemy, its demise has left a vacancy that is now (in the post-Cold War era) being filled by China. Crucially, China’s identity, particularly as a non-democracy, continues to be dislocated from that of the US as the leader of the democratic world. Consequently, with a ‘threatening other' in mind, the process of devising foreign policy leads China experts down the rabbit hole of Cold War frameworks: comparing and contrasting the two communist rivals.
Alongside historical analogies, US-China relations are often framed as an issue of crisis management whereby unless the United States acts to countervail it, China is predicted to become “the undisputed master of East Asia” by the late 2020s. Here, there is little doubt about who is the manager and who is to be managed, as the framework of equal sovereign states dissipates in light of American universal concerns as the indispensable nation. Indicative of how the US represents itself and others, for the current US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, “American leadership still matters’ because ‘the world simply does not organise itself”. It is against this backdrop that academics and politicians alike speak of “conceding China a sphere of influence in Asia” — the “world's most dynamic region” — as an unacceptable outcome of US foreign policy. These statements and subsequent policy formulations assume that China’s regional and historical role is contingent on US action. This key assumption of the ‘China threat’ debate is symptomatic of much older Eurocentric narratives of West-East interactions.
Uncovering and overcoming Eurocentrism
Informed by an exceptionalist understanding of American identity, US-China opposition is framed through the lenses of a ‘clash of civilisations’. This narrative is ahistorical and counterproductive as it is premised upon homogenous categories and ignores how different civilisations — or cultures — have been interlinked, overlapping and borrowing from each other. A global history perspective overturns the ‘common sense’ view that China opened up to international trade only following the British-imposed Treaty of Nanjing of 1842. Contrary to prevailing views of Europeans’ initial arrival in Asia as “they came, they saw, they conquered”, scholar John M. Hobson paints a different picture: “they came, they saw and they kowtowed”. Why? Because, instead of a barbarian Asian threat, the Portuguese and the Spanish of the sixteenth century and the Dutch and British companies of the seventeenth century encountered complex and thriving regional trading networks centred around the demand for Indian cotton textiles. Indeed, the five ports featured in the Treaty of Nanjing had actually been centres of international trade since at least 1684.
Europeans participated in the intra-Asia trade by inserting themselves into pre-existing networks. Often, they had to ‘go native’, subjecting and adapting to local laws, arrangements and traditions in order to grasp the opportunities provided by non-European trade diasporas including Gujaratis, Persians and the Chinese. Much like we see today, cooperation and conflict operated within a broader relationship of economic interdependence. It was precisely this inter-civilisational interaction that propelled the first global economy of 1500-1850: a polycentric global system, as opposed to one that was dominated by any particular country or region.
With the return of multipolarity, “what we are witnessing today is neither the rise of China nor a new course of global opening, but rather a return to a more open China when it stood near the centre of the first global economy”, Hobson explains. Broadly, China’s ‘going global 1.0’ occurred between 1571-1684 and China’s efforts to open-up since 1978 can be characterised as ‘going global 2.0’. Because the ‘China threat’ debate is premised upon the American understanding of 1945 as year-zero of its own global hegemony, proponents struggle to grapple with the potential for different, past and future, conceptions of a global order.
Recognising the importance of East Asia and the interactions with several Eastern agents in the making of the first global economy overcomes the impulse to securitise China as a problem for the US and its allies to manage. Just as Europeans sought to maintain complex webs of interdependence, benefiting from Chinese ideas, institutions and trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the US can take advantage of the contemporary dynamics. Indeed, American corporations such as Boeing and GE are already taking advantage of the explosion in the Chinese aviation market. A revised understanding of China’s (and India’s) historical role near the centre of this global system can bring American experts one step closer to the “undeniable reality that the return of China (and India) is unstoppable”. And if the current reemergence of China is not necessarily a function of US policy, the focus of the ‘China threat’ debate becomes futile.
Lessons from the past for the future
As a process of representation, the ‘China threat’ framework is complicit with the formulation, enactment and justification of US foreign policy towards China. In other words, assessing China through the binary lens of a threat or a non-threat limits the range of acceptable policies and places a premium on strategic and military considerations that can escalate tensions. As a result, the ‘China threat’ debate risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With the return of China (and India) today, we are witnessing the return, not of the Cold War, but rather of the polycentric global economy that existed after about 1500. Albeit world-changing, Western dominance from 1850-2008 was merely a brief interlude. As Peter Katzenstein notes, history neither ends nor repeats itself, and China’s contemporary rise is neither a rupture in international affairs nor a return of the seventeenth century. Instead, it is a recombination of firm historical foundations that are open to new developments.
This means that China’s strategy is not conceived in a vacuum and that “its future trajectory is contingent on how the US and the West want to see it, as well as how the Chinese choose to shape it”, Pan concludes. Questioning the dominant US representations of China is the first step from denial towards acceptance of what is shaping up to be the Asian century. As the world’s centre of gravity returns to the Indo-Pacific, the US has a unique opportunity to devise a long-term strategy that is ideally independent, or at least conscious, of assumptions about China’s trajectory.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Mariana Vieira is an Editorial Assistant for The World Today. Her research interests include US foreign policy, critical security studies, and empire. After completing her bachelor’s in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Warwick, she pursued an MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation at LSE, followed by an MA in International Peace and Security at King’s College London. Image credit: Flickr/Tauno Tõhk.